Crazy Eights

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Posted By: <b>bruce Dorskind</b><p><br />Last night a wonderful E -Bay auction of 40 PSA 8 T-26 and one 1 PSA 9 ended<br />with mind boggling prices.<br /><br />Total sales for the 40 PSA cards exceeded $110,000. A quick calcuation means that<br />the average card brought close to $2750 a card with prices ranging from $1250<br />at the low end to $7500 for Chance. The "common 9" brought over 6000<br /><br />I wonder how high is up. Although the cards were beautiful, it was a rather <br />unremarkable group of players and 95% of the cards were common backs.<br /><br />I bid on 7 lots and only had one winner-winning in the last 2 seconds (lucky)<br /><br />How high can these 8's go?<br /><br />

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Posted By: <b>Anonymous</b><p>--

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Posted By: <b>Josh Adams</b><p>Could this be a result of that PSA "Best of" list, or whatever it is called? <br><br>Go Go White Sox<br />2005 World Series Champions!

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Posted By: <b>WP</b><p>Not really a remarkable looking group.

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Posted By: <b>Peter Thomas</b><p>I have 19 8's and 3 9's, Including a Speaker and a horizontal could be time to say goodby - those are crazy prices.

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Posted By: <b>WPA</b><p>As high as people's wallets will take them <img src="/images/happy.gif" height=14 width=14><br /><br />Personally I think its rather remarkable that people will pay several thousand dollars for them. While I don't agree about the comment regarding the idea that they have all been tampered with....at some point the fact that there is no real way to know for sure the providence of these fine specimens will/should? impact the prices.<br /><br />This subject has been discussed before...I still think that the last three-four years remind me of the mid 70's-early 80 runup in stamp values...the stock market in the 70's went nowhere and investors poured money into stamps....in the early 80's they took it out and it turned out that there weren't as many "collectors" as folks thought previously to absorb the material and prices for most older high value stamps collapsed.<br /><br />But there are just as many valid arguments for why the prices will stablize rather than fall....so only time will tell. <br /><br /><br /><br />

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Posted By: <b>Adam Smith</b><p>Prices for cards like that are ridiculous, but some people have more money than brain.

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Posted By: <b>WP</b><p>A similar run up on prices took place about 18 months ago on Mint 1951 Bowman cards. The cards were selling for 2500-5000 bucks. Needless to say after a few key collectors got the cards they needed and when one decided to sell his collection the market tanked. They sell for between 500 and 700 now. I see the same future for 06s.

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Posted By: <b>JimB</b><p>How many HOFs were there in the group? Was Chance the only one?<br />JimB

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Posted By: <b>joe brennan</b><p> I saw those and thought the cards were magnificent. Alot of them I looked at were from THE HARRIS COLLECTION. I picked up a 3 and 4 last night. The 4 was a Polar Bear back. Total price $72. I'm just as happy with these as most collectors are with 8's and 9's. <br><br>A scared man can't gamble and a jealous man can't work.

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Posted By: <b>jay behrens</b><p>And the Harris Collection is synonymous with trimmed and alltered cards. The cards may look impressive, but many of them have been doctored.<br /><br />Jay<br /><br />I've just reached Upper Lower Class. I am now officially a babe magnet for poor chicks.

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Posted By: <b>Tom Batchelor</b><p>Joe,<br /><br />I agree with you. I bid on 30 PSA 2-4s yesterday and won a nice PSA 2 J.Collins.<br /><br />I was in college working at a baseball card shop in Charlottesville, VA in the late 1980s when the owner, Marco Rol, purchased several hundred near mint - mint T206s from an elderly original collector in Richmond. I was fortunate to see, handle (carefully), and purchase several of these original pieces. Today, however, for the money, I would rather have a set of PSA 2-4s than a dozen or so "high end" pieces.<br /><br />Just my humble opinion.

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Posted By: <b>Mark Rios</b><p>There are alot of those pretty cards in holders<br />that once were a sight for sore eyes.

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Posted By: <b>JimB</b><p>Jay,<br />I am curious about your comment on the Harris Collection cards. I am not doubting you, but wonder where you got your information. Are you just suspicious or do you know something others do not?<br />JimB

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Posted By: <b>Martin Neal</b><p>Hi Tom, I live in Charlottesville and remember Marco well and his shop on Main Street. I bought 25 mint upper deck Kevin Maas from him and a t206 Pattee. I have also seen a few of that hoard that came from Richmond. They still talk about it around here. I thought there was closer to a thousand in that find and they averaged around near mint. Do you remember where the bulk of them went to?

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Posted By: <b>Tom Batchelor</b><p>Hey Martin,<br /><br />I think that close to one thousand cards is accurate. We arranged them alphabetically and Marco and Jeff (Prillaman) graded them several times over.<br /><br />Those of us that worked there were allowed to cherry pick any cards we wanted and pay a reasonable fee. I took 3 nrmt-mt commons and 3 HOFers (Bender port, Griffith port, and Joss port). I sold 3 years later to a radiologist in Philadelphia who ended up buying many of those cards. I needed money for med school tuition and my wedding.<br /><br />The bulk of the HOFers went to a dozen or so high end investors. I only remember the radiologist in Philly who bought my 6 cards sight unseen.<br /><br />Jeff Prillaman is still in Charlottesville (owner of Cavalier Cards) and was much more intimately involved with the whole find and sale of the find.<br /><br />It was such a tremendous experience to see all those cards sitting on one big table at once.<br />

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Posted By: <b>Marc S.</b><p>I'm not sure how high these cards will go. Certainly numerical grade seems to be less important once you get to 8 - if you see a PSA 9 selling for less than a PSA 8. That said - the people buying these cards often have literally seven figures in their collections, so overpaying is not something that is really going to make a dent on their retirement. But - at the end of the day, whether the cards are funked with or not, T-206 is often considered the premier pre-war set, and it is one of the few sets that you can probably put together in Near Mint or better condition if you have enough money and time [save for a handful of cards...] There are dozens of people putting together T-206 sets, and many of them seem to have collecting budget dollars available to upgrade their sets. <br /><br />Me? I don't personally have that sort of coin to spend on T-206s [although I picked up two PSA 9s a few years ago that I am happy to house in my collection]. I can tell you that I often see PSA 5's sell in the $75-$125 range, with some examples selling for much, much more. If that is what a PSA 5/SGC 60 is worth, and they come up pretty darn often - perhaps it isn't too out of whack to have the 8s sell for as much as the do. I'm a free-market man, and I believe in the power of free markets. There is enough ego and cash to swing the market on many of these sets significantly - but, at the end of the day, it's not one or two people swining the entire T-206 market [like Branca did on the 1951 Bowmans] - it is a bunch of people. And when that is the case - the outcome seems to be more efficient in terms of economics than anything else.<br /><br />Just my thoughts.

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Posted By: <b>cmoking</b><p>It didn't seem like that many different people won those auctions. For the most part, the same 4 names kept coming up as the winners. One of the interesting issues with the high grade stuff is that the addition or subtraction of just one collector makes a big difference in price. <br /><br />From the PSA registry, it looks like one of those 4 names just recently started to get involved in the set. And that's probably why the prices are so high. Once he's done, the next card that comes up will be much cheaper. The problem is that there may not be a next card.

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Posted By: <b>warshawlaw</b><p>Oh wait, that's wine coolers isn't it <img src="/images/happy.gif" height=14 width=14>

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Posted By: <b>Jeff Prillaman</b><p>Batch -- what's happening (Hey Martin)<br /><br />The Southern Find was close to 1000 T206's in total along with about 30 Turkey Reds. The T206's were brought home from the factory and had never gone into the packs and were uncirculated. Some of the cards still had the paper shavings on them from when they were cut. I would speculate that 50 percent or more of the PSA 9's and 10's in existence came from that find. Somewhere in the basement I have a typed list of the cards in the find. It would be interesting to compare that list to what is on the PSA pop report.<br /><br />Also Marco had developed a grading scale accurate to two decimal places, so cards had grades like 9.35 and 9.50. In that first SCD ad, we got all kinds of calls about crazy pricing. We went triple book on the commons and 4-5 times book on the Hof'ers. The first weekend at a show with them (a Timothy Poth show in Philly) I spent the whole weekend answering the question "Are these reprints". <br /><br />Things I remember off the top of my head were the five Walter Johnsons in the find -- surprisingly there are exactly 5 graded PSA 9. To put in persepctive (this was pregrading days) the T206 Walter Johnson portrait booked at 600 at the time - the nicest one sold for 6000. And it sold to a dealer who told me after the fact that he had a buyer for it.